The History of Role-Playing
Part VI: Revolution!

By Steven Darlington

A fairly complete, mostly accurate and only slightly biased
exposition of the hobby's turbulent existence, from its origins to
the modern day. Serialised in seven parts.

Role-playing is an intrinsically creative hobby, and it
is constantly evolving. As such, it is hard to label
any one era as revolutionary. But in the mid-eighties,
there came a spate of games in quick succession, each
of which not only added an unprecedented amount of new
ideas but also threw away much of established tradition.
Each was revolutionary in its own right, and each formed
an important step in transforming roleplaying into what
it is today.

But as well as being revolutionary, each of these
games was also brilliant. In fact, they include some
of the greatest examples of the hobby ever made, games
that represent the epitome of design, and evoke the most
powerful fantasies. It was here that the pinnacle of the
gaming art was flourishing, and that is why this era can
be called a true Golden Age.

The best example, and indeed one of the best examples of
roleplaying, is the legendary Call of Cthulhu. Released
in 1981, its genius and importance in the history of
roleplaying cannot be over-emphasised.

The world of Cthulhu comes from a series of deeply
horrifying short stories written by H.P. Lovecraft at the
beginning of this century. These stories center around the
Old Ones, ancient and god-like aliens (of which Cthulhu
is one) who exist just beyond the scientific world of
post-Victorian New England. Lovecraft developed his ideas
into a detailed and frighteningly realistic universe,
now called the Cthulhu Mythos.

It was a fantastic setting for an RPG, but in the early
eighties, the idea was ridiculous. Most RPGs at that time
involved players chasing down monsters or supervillians,
and then disposing of them in bloody combat. But if
the game was to be true to the stories, it would need
to ask players to shift their activities from monster
hunts to investigation and research, and to face horrific
monsters that were invincible no matter how many hit points
you had. Such a revolutionary story paradigm required a
revolutionary system, not just another AD&D clone.

In 1979, RuneQuest had set new standards in game design,
and on its strength of sales, the game's creators formed
the company Chaosium. It was later Chaosium staff member
Sandy Petersen who decided to
tackle turning Cthulhu into a game.

They used RuneQuest as a basis, but they took it further.
Being made in 1979, RuneQuest's rules suffered from too
much detail and being dice-heavy, particularly in combat.
In retooling it for the less violent Cthulhu, much of this
complexity was removed. This simplification was applied
throughout, with everything skimmed down to a uniform
percentile system. These new rules retained RuneQuest's
charm and realism, but were now far easier to learn and
use, yet still robust enough to handle a variety of complex
actions. CoC's rules balance the needs of both game and
story in a way that has arguably never been beaten.

Likewise, there has never been a more invisible system,
one designed to encourage roleplaying by quickly fading
into the background when not needed. For that was one
of the key differences with Call of Cthulhu - here the
rules weren't treated as necessary to simulate a setting
accurately, but rather as a tool for telling stories,
a part of the GM arsenal that should be used as and when
the game called for it. Along with this, CoC was the
first RPG book to explain how to run an effective game,
explaining not just the rules and how to adjudicate them,
but how to make use of the other tools of the GM.

This was necessary, because the real revolutionary step in
CoC was that they succeeded in their goal. That is, they
wrote a game which would enable you to recreate Lovecraft's
stories, in all their intrigue and terror. And since,
compared to Tolkien, Lovecraft was unknown, there was no
implicit understanding of the kind of stories that should
be told - the ethos had to come solely from the rules and
system itself.

To do this, they had to be completely true to the stories,
and that meant throwing away so much of established gaming
tradition. It was pointedly literate and distinctly
intelligent, focusing on character interaction over
combat, slow-paced investigation over dungeoncrawling,
and role-playing over roll-playing.

Such changes may not seem so revolutionary now, but it
should be remembered that roleplaying was very different
then. After the growth spurt of the 70's, the hobby
had acquired a niche, and as its commercial power grew,
no-one was willing to step out of this mindset for fear of
losing sales. Six years after the release of CoC, Avalon
Hill made the addition of halflings to the RuneQuest world
a condition on their publishing the third edition of the
game, simply because halflings made money. In its time,
CoC broke every rule in the book.

Also in 1981, Fantasy Games Unlimited made similar
steps as CoC, in two unique games. Aftermath presented
for once a more realistically bleak post-apocalyptic
world, and reinforced it with equally brutal rules.
Players were still pretty powerful and the games were very
combat-oriented, but here you were battling for food, or
shelter, or just to stay alive. The rules made the players
have to fight every step of the way, with equipment,
allies and safe ground all very scarce.

Meanwhile, Bushido gave a enthralling and realistic view
of roleplaying in Feudal Japan. The historic setting
was reinforced throughout, from mechanics, to NPCs, to
adventure archetypes, with extensive use of Japanese names
encouraging the feel of things. Even more powerful,
though, was the tweaking of the experience system,
such that it required players to act in ways suitable of
their class and standing in the Nippon society. A Gakusho
(priest) needed On (honour) to become master of a temple,
something you couldn't just earn from killing a dragon.

But these types of games represent only one of the new
paths being paved in the hobby. Another type of game
was going a completely different new way - they were
going nuts.

Those familiar with the Four Types of Gamers will know what
a Loony gamer is: the kind of gamer who will do anything
for a laugh, even setting of a fireball at ground zero.
If the Loonies have a leader, it is Greg Costikyan.
It was this flippancy about all the things that other
gamers took so seriously that allowed him to throw away
convention and write revolutionary games.

Costikyan wrote the bible on Loony gaming in his first printed article, Flippancy in FRP

He began with Toon (West End Games, 1984), an idea even
crazier than Cthulhu: an RPG set in the universe (and
mindset) of Warner Brothers-type cartoons, complete with
falling anvils. And like Cthulhu, it somehow succeeded
in communicating this universe, with the text and rules
enabling PCs to start thinking like a toon. Not that there
were many rules, and those that existed were incredibly
basic, wonderfully silly and necessarily, quite loose.
Thus Toon was also one of the first free-form, rules-light
games, another revolutionary step.

But the real revolution was again in the setting -
how could you role-play in a world where death was
non-existent, where reality was variable, where slapstick
humour was the only constant? Like Cthulhu before it,
this threw away every previous convention in roleplaying -
even basic things like overcoming odds to get a reward, and
telling a logical, progressive narrative. In this game,
absolutely nothing mattered except making people laugh.
Though humour games are now more popular, none are as
down-right insane, nor as much free-wheeling fun to play.

Even more legendary when it comes to lunacy was
Costikyan's next game, Paranoia. Made with Dan Gelber
and Eric Goldberg, and released the same year as Toon,
Paranoia also turned the game world on its head. In its
Orwellian futuristic society called Alpha Complex, death is
meaningless (again) because each player has several clones
of herself in case one is damaged. You need them, though,
for the PCs are special agents of the Big Brother-esque
Computer, chosen to undertake the most dangerous task
of rooting out traitors. Traitors include those with
mutant powers, those who are members of secret societies,
and anyone who looks at you funny. Unfortunately, each
PC has a mutant power, is a member of a secret society,
and is surrounded by people with exactly the same orders,
and very powerful weapons.

Paranoia plays this frightening world for laughs, hamming
up the dark patches to produce a game as funny as Toon,
but also more subtle and with a dash of political satire.
And Paranoia is still the only game that is based solely
on the PCs working against each other. The rules were
again perfectly suited to recreate the paranoia of the
society, and to encourage fast and fiery deaths - er, play.
Like Cthulhu, Paranoia is a pinnacle in the history,
a game of unmatched brilliance.

Costikyan went on to design (with Greg Stafford and Sandy
Petersen from Chaosium) Ghostbusters, which kept up the
standards in both humour and great design. The simple
but powerful D6 system it used would be refined for
Costikyan's more serious but equally smooth Star Wars,
which was covered previously. But Costikyan wasn't the
only one leading the charge.

Greg Stafford had already epitomised gaming in 1979
with RuneQuest. He did it again in 1984 with Pendragon.
Like all the games above, Pendragon blended rules and
setting to produce a game that strongly communicated the
entrancing stories of Arthurian legend. But Pendragon
took this further than any previous game, to the point
of perfection. Every detail of the game is completely
centred in the ethos, such that the players get completely
absorbed, and actually begin to think like knights of the
Round Table.

Pendragon also forced the emphasis towards role-playing, by
wiring personality traits and history into characters, and
making such things just as important as combat statistics.
Pendragon also rocked the hobby with its idea of long
term play. Characters in Pendragon age considerably:
if played as suggested on a weekly basis, players could
find their alter egos aging forty or fifty years in a year
of play. This ingenious device requires characters to have
a life outside of adventuring, and to grow and develop as
people, thus making them more dramatic and more real to
the players.

Ars Magica (Lion Rampant, 1985) also used this idea of
the passage of time very well, but with its own twist.
Ars Magica casts the players as highly powerful mages in an
intensely real version of the Middle Ages. The mages are
so powerful, however, they have to be balanced as limited
lab-rats. To counteract this, Ars Magica has players
make a variety of characters, who can handle the various
situations that the magi can't, and players interchange
between what character they play with each adventure.
And rather than tell the story of a few characters, the
driving force behind a campaign was the life of the whole
community, over many years. In game terms, the community
and its infrastructure is treated as a shared character,
a revolutionary stroke that ensured a strong group dynamic
between characters.

Ars Magica also challenged the game design
world with one of the best magic systems ever designed,
one which was both regulated and free form.

The next year, Games Workshop stopped producing wargames
long enough to give us the brilliant Warhammer Fantasy
RolePlay. WFRP's system was good and hard. Its intelligent
and involving experience and careers system was particular
genius, finding both a perfect middle ground between
class-based and free-form character design, and likewise
between the adventuring lifestyle and a realistic medieval
existence. But the setting was even better. A skillful
blend of Elizabethan conspiracy and dark horror, WFRP's
adventures are renowned for their frightening intensity.

By this time, innovation was in fashion, and everyone was
having a go. And as the trend continued, anything seemed
possible - even removing the dice!

Amber and Everway are the two most famous diceless
pioneers. Amber (based on the novels by Roger Zelazny)
is set in a universe of shifting realities and infinite
possibilities, and thus it requires a rules-light system
open to interpretation. For this, the cards are well
suited and thus it was a success. Similarly, the epic
and cerebral nature of Everway's stories makes the using
of Tarot cards to mimic the fates very fitting.

TORG also added the psychological element to
combat, with a good taunt being as effective as a fast
lunge

TORG (West End Games, 1990), an exciting cross-genre
game, used both cards and dice in its universal system.
TORGs "Drama Deck" not only offered players random play
advantages like bonuses to dice rolls, but also allowed
story interaction, with cards allowing subplots like
ancient enmities or new loves to be added at the players
discretion. At the same time, Lace and Steel came up with
a cunning system of cards to model the many ins and outs
of fencing, which was a major factor in their Renaissance
setting.

As games grew more intense, it seemed only a matter of time
before someone went the whole hog and threw everything
away, and did it for real. However, Live Action had
actually begun much earlier. In America, it began in 1981,
when some students in Boulder set up the DreamPark inspired
"International Fantasy Gaming Society". But it didn't take
off there as quickly as it did in England. A few years
later, Treasure Trap appeared there, a dungeon bash that
benefited from being set in a real castle. Though there
was some initial resistance, the revolutionary spirit of
the eighties welcomed this new avenue.

And so the innovation went on. Here I have touched on
just a few of the more famous; in the late eighties,
every game was revolutionary in some way. At the start
of the decade, almost every game was rolling 3D6 for the
attributes and featuring hobbits, because that was what
D&D did. By the end, a game just wouldn't sell unless
it promised not only an exciting new universe, but also
revolutionary new mechanics to go with it. Though this
need to innovate was mostly market driven, it marked the
greatest era of the hobby's history so far. For amongst
these surface changes were ideas that were changing
the fundamental bases of role-playing games, and when
combined, these ideas would change people's conceptions
of roleplaying games. They had gone from personalised
wargames to being a dramatic story-telling exercise,
perhaps even an intellectual pursuit. This evolution has
continued, but there has been nothing to compare with the
revolutionary Golden Age of the eighties.